• Preventive Maintenance is maintenance you perform on your RV before a problem exists. These checks are designed to prevent or identify potential problems that could lead to mechanical breakdown, malfunction or failure of a component or system on your RV. Preventive maintenance consists of cleaning, inspecting, lubricating, adjusting and servicing your RV.

• Scheduled Maintenance or routine maintenance is performed in intervals normally based on time, mileage or hours. Scheduled maintenance is designed to keep your RV in top operating condition and prevent untimely breakdowns and repairs. It is absolutely essential that you read your owner's manual and warranty information in regards to who is responsible for what when it comes to scheduled maintenance. Scheduled maintenance that is required by the manufacturer and not performed can void your warranty.

• Emergency Maintenance - Maintenance and / or repairs required when you least expect it due to component, system or mechanical failure.

The lack of preventive maintenance and / or scheduled maintenance will eventually result in emergency maintenance. If you don't check the air pressure in your tires (preventive maintenance) the under-inflated tire over heats and prematurely fails resulting in emergency maintenance.

Preventive maintenance is really nothing more than common sense maintenance. If you're going to take a thousand mile trip in your automobile common sense tells us at a minimum to check all of the fluid levels, tires and lights. Too often we assume that all of the fluid levels are fine, that there are no leaks and when you look at the tires they look like they are inflated properly. In many cases this is why we have an unexpected break down, because we failed to do a little preventive maintenance.

Now consider an RV. It's larger and heavier than your automobile and its not just the chassis you need to be concerned about, it's your entire house sitting on top of the chassis. The bottom line is an RV requires more preventive maintenance than an automobile. The good news is the average RV owner can perform the required preventive maintenance and prevent untimely break downs and costly repairs (emergency maintenance).

Before you take your next trip put some time aside to perform some preventive maintenance. It could be the difference between a safe and enjoyable trip and a costly disastrous one. How does the old saying go, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure! To help make the chore of checking out your RV a little easier I am including a short checklist. Start your preventive maintenance program with these checks and over time add some of your own checks and without even realizing it you will be identifying and preventing potential problems before they exist.

Vehicle Chassis Checklist: